Home > Author >
1 " In the heyday of the campus novel “you could afford farce,” explains A.S. Byatt, because universities were intensely hopeful, whereas “now they’re terrified and cowering and underfinanced and overexamined and overbureaucratised” (qtd. in Edemariam 34). "
― , Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy
2 " ...the fast models of mechanization have taken over how we think about scholarship and ourselves. Slowing down is a matter of ethical import. To drive oneself as if one were a machine should be recognized as a form of self-harm. "
3 " The Slow movement can get us back in touch with what it means to carry out scholarly work. Instead of “I am producing ...,” we might say to ourselves and others, “I am contemplating ...,” or “I am conversing with ...” or even “I am in joyful pursuit of ... "
4 " one of the many valuable recommendations in this book is that we academics should, collectively, talk to each other more about how we actually spend our time, with all the anxieties, displacements, and failures that involves, rather than presenting ourselves as the overachieving writing robots whom most systems of assessment seem designed to reward. "
5 " We need, then, to protect a time and a place for timeless time, and to remind ourselves continually that this is not self-indulgent but rather crucial to intellectual work. If we don’t find timeless time, there is evidence that not only our work but also our brains will suffer. "
6 " Ironically, our feelings of lack of productivity and not measuring up have not led us until now to “read” the institution; our self-blame has played into corporate values. As many have commented, there has been little protest from academics to the attack on the core principles of the university. It is not only that academics are “run off their feet” (Menzies and Newson, “Over-Extended Academic” par. 3) but also that the individualistic and meritocratic values of academic training inhibit collective awareness. While "
7 " time sickness,” the “obsessive belief that ‘time is getting away, that there isn’t enough of it’” (qtd. in Honoré 3). "
8 " Donna Palmateer Pennee writes that “time” is “our most pressing infrastructural (and personal and political) need” (73). "
9 " We argue that approaching our professional practice from a perspective influenced by the Slow movement has the potential to disrupt the corporate ethos of speed. "
10 " If learning were purely or even predominantly cognitive, then computers would be adequate and there would be no point in gathering people together in a room. But affects are social, “are there first, before we are” (65). The affective environment influences the nature of cognition: “affects may, at least in some instances, find thoughts that suit them, not the other way around” (7). "
11 " We envisage Slow Professors acting purposefully, cultivating emotional and intellectual resilience. By taking the time for reflection and dialogue, the Slow Professor takes back the intellectual life of the university. "
12 " Slow Professors advocate deliberation over acceleration. We need time to think, and so do our students. Time for reflection and open-ended inquiry is not a luxury but is crucial to what we do. "
13 " the stereotype of the lazy academic is, like that of the welfare queen, a politically useful myth” (par. 24). "
14 " The notion of students as customers combined with greater reliance on technology has led to the increased blurring of work and life, with, for example, “demands such as 24-hour limit for responses to student queries” (par. 22). "
15 " Stefan Collini comments that the “fallacy of accountability” is “the belief that the process of reporting on an activity in the approved form provides some guarantee that something worthwhile has been properly done” (What Are Universities For? 108). The "
16 " In the earliest study by Walter Gmelch, first published in 1984 and reproduced in 1993, the top ten self-reported stressors, in order of rank, are (1) “imposing excessively high self-expectations”; (2) “securing financial support for my research”; (3) “having insufficient time to keep abreast of current developments in my field”; (4) “receiving inadequate salary to meet financial needs”; (5) “preparing a manuscript for publication”; (6) “feeling that I have too heavy a workload, one that I cannot possibly finish during the normal working day”; (7) “having job demands which interfere with other personal activities (recreation, family, and other interests)”; (8) “believing that progress in my career is not what it should or could be”; (9) “being interrupted frequently by telephone calls and drop-in visitors”; (10) “attending meetings which take up too much time” (Gmelch 21–4). At "
17 " Martha C. Nussbaum’s manifesto Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities "